by Anthony Youn
First day of orientation.
9:27 A.M.
I arrive thirty-three minutes early.
I’m not close to the first one here.
I walk into the auditorium and count twenty-three other obsessively early nut jobs. They’re way ahead of me, settled in, sipping coffee, checking me out. I claim a seat, right side, middle back. I want to establish a strong lookout point, in military terms—okay, in military videogame terms—the clearing on the hill overlooking the action. I want to position myself so I can observe the people coming in. I want to size up the competition and assess my peers, but mainly, I want to determine possible friends and women who might go out with me. I said might.
I start by scoping out the walk. The women who walk with purpose—those who stride in as if they own the place—scare me. I cross them off. I realize almost immediately that every woman strides in. I have to lower my standards. I’m down to homely women who seem nervous or confused and who aren’t towing a boyfriend or cradling a baby.
Within fifteen minutes the auditorium is full, and I identify every conceivable type of student—freaks, geeks, nerds, stoners, mathletes, punks, weirdos, jocks, preppies, and surfers. Asians represent, along with a rainbow coalition of international students from other countries and cultures, many of whom I recognize as residents of Owen Hall. All of us gathered in one lecture hall, my class feels comfortably diverse.
As we settle in, a low din thrums through the room, punctuated by the intermittent whacking of wooden seats and the occasional shrill laugh. The nervousness builds, and the volume rises. The auditorium floor vibrates beneath the bounce of shaky legs, mine among them. I begin to sense fear coursing through the room. Fear of the first day. Fear of not fitting in. Fear of the unknown. Most of all, fear of failure.
We heard it all at our interviews. Medical students never flunk out. We all make it through somehow. Some of us will excel, some will squeak by, most of us will land right in the middle. In the end, unless we can’t take it and quit, we will all become doctors. But few of us will become the doctors we hoped to be. Maybe that’s what fuels our fear. We’re afraid that we won’t live up to our expectations, that we’ll fall short of our own dreams.
A group of semi-decrepit white-haired men and women enter the hall and slowly make their way to the front of the auditorium. Nobody seems younger than eighty. As they walk, the din flattens into a hush. For some reason, I decide to do a quick count of the class. I count 102 of us, half women. How many eligible women? Maybe half of the half. Realistically, I have to whittle that number down, even beyond the confident ones who scare me. I eliminate a few because of age. A surprising number of women seem to be well past thirty, closing in on middle age. A few are old, grandmother-old. Even if they’re sort of cute, I cross them off. I also eliminate a few on physical appearance. I have a problem with nose rings, lip rings, eyebrow spears, earlobe piercings, tongue studs, and multiple ear hoops—all in the same person. And I have to remove from contention a three-hundred-pound woman in the far right corner who takes up three seats, one for a case of Mountain Dew, the other two for her ass.
The first of a succession of white-haired deans—this one a six-nine scarecrow—steps forward and, towering over a podium, grips both sides to manage his trembling hands, welcomes us. Voice cracking, he cackles into the microphone, causing ear-bleeding feedback. “Say goodbye to the next eleven years of your lives.”
I want to join the polite, scared-shitless laughter that results, but I refrain because I don’t think he’s joking. He follows up this opening remark with a disclaimer: “Medical school isn’t that bad.” Then he paints a gulag-like picture of endless hours of study, indifference to hygiene, mind-numbing and brain-teasing examinations (“If you flunk, we won’t kick you out; you’ll just keep taking your exams over and over again until you pass—takes some of you years”), lack of communication with, well, everyone, and—just what I need to hear—involuntary chastity. After Old Dean Happy frightens the hell out of us, a numb, pale second-year student named Mandi gives us an overview of first year from the student perspective, ending with this tearful summary: “I didn’t return any phone calls or e-mails during my entire first year. And I’ll never forgive myself because I missed my nana’s funeral.” Mandi gives way to a series of cadaverous deans who repeat pretty much the same cheery message of Old Dean Happy. Then three speakers in a row send me into shock.
First, we endure a convoluted rambling from a flint-eyed financial-aid officer who glumly reports that we will all leave medical school in debt up to our eyes, most of us owing in excess of $100,000 in student loans. He offers no solution to this problem but suggests we set up an appointment to see if we qualify for a low-interest student loan. Is he serious? He must be serious. It’s too early in the morning to be trashed.
Second, a lawyer wearing a goop-slicked toupee that threatens to slide off assures us, “It’s not a question if you’ll be sued for malpractice, it’s when and how often. Let me put it another way. Don’t worry about screwing up. You will. But what will it cost you? Will you go bankrupt? Doctors do all the time.” He waits for us outside the lecture hall, morosely handing out his business card.
Finally, a dark-complexioned man in a dull blue suit, his round, kind face bookmarked by two furry sideburns in need of pruning, implores us not to lose hope even when we think the world is caving in on us and when all we see is darkness and when we believe that our lives are meaningless.
“Who is this guy?” I say to the preppie next to me.
“The chaplain,” the preppie says.
“The chaplain? This is gonna be so bad that we need a priest?”
One more uplifting speech, this one from the med-school shrink who suggests we begin each day by giving ourselves a hug. Even the chaplain’s hairy eyebrows rise at that suggestion. Then Mandi returns to the podium, assures us that we’ll all make it through, and ends with a joke: “What do you call the med student who finishes last in his medical-school class? Doctor.” To tepid laughter, she thanks everyone who spoke and announces that we will spend the rest of orientation week in small groups of seven. Our names and group leaders—second-year students, who seem godlike to me simply because they’ve survived first year without becoming drooling idiots or throwing themselves in front of a train—have been posted outside the lecture hall.
I wish the preppie next to me good luck, swim out of my row and into the mass of students surging up the aisle. I find my name on one of the lists and locate the classroom for my group. Outside the door, three guys lean against the wall. We shake hands all around and introduce ourselves—James, a pretty boy in a cutoff Duke sweatshirt; Ricky, slight, hyper, Hawaiian shirt, not just gay but La Cage aux Folles gay; and Tim, fast-talking, confident, from Penn and Owen Hall, a floor below me.
I don’t know it then, but the four of us—as unlikely a foursome as you could imagine—will soon become best friends for life.
BILLY, OUR GROUP leader, long hair, pouty rock-star aura, waits in the doorway for the last member of our group to show. Every time a cute female passes, Billy hits on her. “Hey there, where you going? Your group’s right here. You’re number one on my list. Come back! Can I get your number?”
“So, second-year, you want to lead an orientation group because it’s a good way to meet women,” Tim says.
“Depends on the group,” Billy mutters. At the moment our group contains only two women, a white-haired grandma and a brunette with a wedding ring. “We’re missing one. Let her please be female.”
“I’m not loving Owen Hall,” Tim says to me.
“It sucks,” I say. “Too many Asians.”
This breaks up Tim, James, and Ricky.
“What? I’m not Asian. I’m American. I was born in Detroit.”
“You could pass,” James says.
“Maybe we should start,” Billy says. He looks longingly at a woman in tight jeans who seems lost. “You’re in this group. Yes, you are. There she goes. Dissed. Screw i
t. One more minute and I’m closing the door.”
Tim lowers his voice so only I can hear. “One positive thing about Owen Hall. The girls are fast.”
I’m stunned. “Really?”
“This chick, borderline looks, short—as in tiny, circus tiny—keeps asking me to have dinner with her. Last night I finally did to shut her up. Plus, I was curious about maybe getting some Cirque du Soleil action—”
I stare at him. “Peggy? You slept with Peggy?”
“I’m not very picky, but no, thank you. In the middle of the meal, she starts mashing my crotch with her foot and goes, ‘I’m having this for dessert.’ I ran like hell.”
“She’s a stalker.”
“The official term is ‘crazy lunatic psycho stalker.’ I’m gonna be a shrink.”
“Woo.” A throaty voice at the door. Followed by heavy pornographic breathing. “I made it. Sorry.”
The three-hundred-pound woman who sat in the corner of the lecture hall stands huffing in the doorway, the case of Mountain Dew tucked under her arm like a football. She coughs, her sumo shoulders heave, her face flames. She shuffles into the room on sandals the size of skis. I notice a pack of Virginia Slims rolled up inside her shirtsleeve, against her WWE-size biceps. I don’t want to be judgmental, but this woman is going to be a doctor?
“This building’s like a maze,” she says.
“Very glad you found us,” Billy says in a wobbly voice that tells me he’s not at all glad. “Welcome.”
“Gail,” the woman says, thrusting out an arm the size of an alligator. “My friends call me Gail the Whale. I can’t imagine why.” She barks out a laugh that goes on forever and alone.
Billy throws on a truly fake smile, then sneaks a look at Tim and me in what I can only call terror. I’ve never been able to read lips, but I’m pretty sure he mouths, “She-eeeet.”
MOMENTS LATER, BILLY drops his I’m only in this to meet women facade and morphs into the weighty role of second-year medical student and group leader. He asks us to give our name, hometown, college we attended, and share one fun fact, something you’d never guess. I say that I play the guitar and my favorite singer-songwriter is Jimmy Buffett. This elicits a round of groans, undeserved, in my opinion, and one uncalled-for “Were you dropped on your head as a child?” from Tim.
After we’ve all shared our information, Billy pauses, looks us over, and says, “Now I’m going to ask you a question. But I don’t want you to answer until the end of the week. It’s an obvious question, the obvious question, but we don’t trust each other yet to answer the question truthfully.”
He holds for a beat.
“Why do you want to be a doctor?”
We actually laugh.
“How about a trial run? For fun. Let me ask one of you now, and we’ll see how the answer differs at the end of the week.”
He’s going to pick me. Guaranteed. Never fails.
“Tony?”
“Pass.”
A big laugh. I’m serious, but Billy’s look tells me he’s not letting me off the hook.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t care. I’m going to say the same thing now and at the end of the week.” I pause. “I want to help people.”
Even bigger laugh. Followed by applause.
“This isn’t your med-school interview,” Billy says. “You’re already in.”
“Fine. I’ll get back to you guys in a week.”
“Trust each other,” Billy says. “That’s what we’re going for. Okay, everybody up.”
“Allow us,” Tim says. “You took one for the team.” He and James pull me to my feet.
“Cute answer,” Ricky says, pushing me from behind. “I would’ve said I have a constant ache to heal the world.”
“All right,” Billy says. “We call this exercise the trust fall.”
He grabs a folding table that’s pressed against a wall and carries it to the center of the room. He vaults up onto the table. “Here’s how it works. You climb up here, cross your hands on your chest, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let yourself fall. We will catch you. All of us. Like I said, it’s about trust.”
A couple of uncomfortable laughs cut through nervous murmuring.
I have no problem catching a total stranger hurtling backward through space. But falling—
I look at James, Ricky, and Tim, and even though I’ve known them for under an hour, I know instinctively that I can trust these guys, that they will catch me.
“So,” Billy says, cupping his hands and blowing on them as if he’s warming them over a campfire, “do I have a volunteer?”
What the hell.
I’m ready to trust.
I step forward.
“Ah, whatever.”
Gail. Voice jagged as a saw. She shoves past me, waddles to the desk, and reaches two fists the size of basketballs toward Billy, whose mouth has sprung open and flopped to the floor like a puppet’s. Billy latches on to Gail’s wrists while Tim and James rush over and shove her from behind. Gail rolls onto the table. Panting, she climbs to her feet and stands over us, her tree-stump legs quivering. The seven of us rush toward the table, our arms extended as if we’re weekend volunteer firefighters.
Gail looks down at us and, her massive body swaying, shakes her head.
“You may want to get another group in here,” she says.
HAVING OUR WHOLE group flattened by a three-hundred-pound medical student is by far the highlight of orientation.
After dismissing us early the first day, Billy cruises the other groups and determines that the other fourteen contain at least two, sometimes three pretty women, while he’s stuck with a wife, a grandma, and Gail the Whale. By the second day, he loses interest in our group altogether and tries to switch with a friend, with no luck. Every morning he shows up late and every afternoon he ends our orientation sessions early, earlier each day, to the point that days three and four, we finish before lunch. Billy’s abandonment does give us a leg up. Tim, James, Ricky, and I are so bored and eager to begin classes that any pre-med-school jitters we had have evaporated.
We celebrate the stultifying finale to orientation week with a first-year bash at the USA Café, a kitschy diner by day—colorful maps of the states on the walls, laminated place mats and paper napkins of presidential faces on the tables—that converts to a dance club and med-school hangout by night. I meet Tim in his room an hour before the party.
“What if the party sucks?” he says.
“It could definitely suck.”
“That’s why we should get wasted now.” He jiggles a six-pack of Molson at me, tears off three cans, underhands them to me. We pound them.
Allow me to destroy a cliché. At least a cliché that seems to follow me everywhere. Which is—
Med students party like rap stars and drink like Irish poets.
No.
We like to think we party hard. We like to portray ourselves as debauched, out-of-control frat boys with stethoscopes. But we’re not. No matter how we appear or act, even if we’re great-looking and smooth, we are, at our core, nerds and lightweights. Sure, I can think of exceptions. A few. They all become orthopedic surgeons.
This night with Tim, I don’t know this yet. As I polish off my third beer and crush the can into my forehead and follow that up with an impressive belch, I picture certain college friends who, on a typical Saturday night, could—and did—drain an entire case of beer alone. I don’t strive to be them. Who would? It’s just that Tim and I don’t know each other well yet, and we overcompensate right out of the box. We assume the role of big-drinking, hard-partying med students. For one night—the first of our many nights together—we become the cliché. As soon as classes start—tomorrow!—we’ll find out that the intensity of medical school will fry our brains, leaving us sufficiently fuzzy-headed and bleary-eyed without any need to amp it up with excessive alcohol.
But after three beers, I’m shouting “Woo!” at everything Tim says, and he’s l
aughing at everything I say as if I’m Chris Rock. Slinging jackets over our shoulders, we windmill down the stairwell of Owen Hall, ricocheting off the walls, until we arrive in the parking lot by the bike rack, where we have tethered our twin Huffys. My head feels underwater. I stare at the bikes. His, blood-red, pulsates. Mine, baby-blue, shimmers.
“Identical-twin bikes,” Tim says. “Ridiculous.”
“‘They did not know each other when they bought them,’” I say, going all voice-over-documentary narrator. “‘They had no idea they were buying the same exact bike. Coincidence? I think not.’”
“You are trashed,” Tim says.
“On three beers? Hahahahaha.”
“Lightweight. You have to learn to hold your beer. I will train you.” Tim fiddles with the lock on his bike, yanks it, slams it, opens his hand as if freeing a bird, and lets the horseshoe-shaped contraption swing and clang unopened against the metal rack. “I need a new lock. You wouldn’t happen to have a hacksaw on you, would you?”
“That’s my bike, dipshit.”
“Well, I’ll be. How do you like that?”
“Who’s the lightweight?”
“You. By a wide margin.”
He laughs, a scary hyena keen, then with a magician’s flourish, he springs the lock on his red Huffy, swings his leg over the handlebars like a cowboy, salutes, pedals off, and plows right into the bike rack.
He folds into the pavement like a cartoon.
I RULE THE dance floor. In line-dance-style—thirty of us, our fingertips resting on strangers’ hips—we sway, we slide, we shimmy, we reach for imaginary items from imaginary shelves and place them in our imaginary shopping carts, then we shake-shake-shake down the grocery-store aisle. This dance—“the shopping cart”—comes straight out of Greenville by way of Kalamazoo, bouncing its way here to the unlikely USA Café in East Lansing, where tonight, snaking through the entire restaurant, I lead the line. Head and neck bobbing to Duran Duran whining through a bank of tinny speakers, I am the undisputed master of the shopping cart. Sweat puddles up on my forehead. I mop my brow with a napkin someone hands me featuring President William McKinley’s nearly forgotten face.